Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[bennymac]

Blame Fox who had their main doctor (their version of Dr Sanjay Gupta) say in the first week of March that the WHO were alarmists and at worst this was just gonna be like the flu.

[beer30]

19,000 new cases yesterday in Germany. This is a country with a median age of 45.7, not good.....

[jono]

@basinbeater Do you remember the press conference where a doctor working for the WHO spent a bunch of time praising the Chinese government and the great job they were doing? I heard it on NPR sometime in January, I think, but I can't find it now.

The guy sounded like a POW reading propoganda. Which seemed like the clearest signal to date that shit was real and the Chinese government wasn't being transparent: he obviously felt he had to deliver that statement for some reason, presumably to get access.

I'm not sure how much that kind of thing plays into the narrative of blaming WHO, but it was late January at least before they acknowledged human-to-human transmission--of an outbreak the CCP had been suppressing for more than a month. There have been significant mistakes. (None as bad as relying on the WHO instead of having CDC people on the ground in China in the first place, but still.)

[riser4]

Perhaps if we somehow could have had people on the ground there. Oh, right, nevermind.

[riser4]

Fucking hockey players.

https://www.wcax.com/2020/10/30/stat...as-cases-rise/

Give yer balls a tug you titfucker.

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Kirstie Alley?

Do the Scientologists have a cure for the covids yet?

A cocktail of Tom Cruise’s and Travolta’s urine


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[goldenboy]

Pretty sure Covid woke up today thinking "Today's gonna be a good day. Everyone get dressed up and party, people. Let's do this!"

[KQ]

Finished my second wave/election mayhem shopping. Hopefully I just guaranteed it will be all for naught.

On the news the other night they were preaching "stay calm and don't hoard this time" which made me wonder "where's the line between stocking up and hoarding?" then I thought "fuck it - I'm getting what I need now and settling in."

[riser4]

Praise Dog and pass the ammunition.

[KQ]

Praise Dog and pass the ammunition.

Something like that but more along the lines of chocolate, flour, cannabis and food for the kittehs. LOL!

Making a big pot of chicken noodle soup and biscuits today!

[riser4]

Something like that but more along the lines of chocolate, flour, cannabis and food for the kittehs. LOL!

Making a big pot of chicken noodle soup and biscuits today!

That works.

[basinbeater]

@basinbeater Do you remember the press conference where a doctor working for the WHO spent a bunch of time praising the Chinese government and the great job they were doing? I heard it on NPR sometime in January, I think, but I can't find it now.

The guy sounded like a POW reading propoganda. Which seemed like the clearest signal to date that shit was real and the Chinese government wasn't being transparent: he obviously felt he had to deliver that statement for some reason, presumably to get access.

I'm not sure how much that kind of thing plays into the narrative of blaming WHO, but it was late January at least before they acknowledged human-to-human transmission--of an outbreak the CCP had been suppressing for more than a month. There have been significant mistakes. (None as bad as relying on the WHO instead of having CDC people on the ground in China in the first place, but still.)

I don't remember that specific one, but I vaguely remember them praising china for their response. And some of that praise is reflected in the daily reports on the outbreak.
Say what you want about china, but I believe they took this a little more seriously than the fat fuck trump. We have more cases in one day now than they have in the entire pandemic. And you know whose economy is back up and humming? Theirs. You know which country is on the verge of being fucked up big time with lots more dead people and huge amounts of economic pain? Ours. You know who is failing to deal with this? US. Our country. But we knew what to do. I mean hell, we basically wrote the book on how to deal with this shit. We just can't execute anymore.


sent from Utah.

[basinbeater]

China coronavirus trend.


sent from Utah.

[altasnob]

The whole blame it on China, or blame it on WHO, is a trivial discussion to me. Even if in late December, China and WHO had started screaming at the rest of the world that the virus is serious, highly infectious, airborne, ect. would that have changed where we are at today? Do people think the entire world could have shut themselves off from China and keep the virus isolated there? It was inevitable that a virus this infectious (but not so deadly it kills itself off, like SARS-CoV) was going to spread everywhere on earth. Trying to isolate the virus in China may have helped slow the spread, but I don't think this was realistically possible regardless of what China and WHO were broadcasting at the early stages of the pandemic. But China and WHO do provide an easy scapegoat.

[Ted Striker]

chocolate, flour, cannabis and food for the kittehs.

So the cats are baking hash brownies that are actually poisonous to dogs... pure genius.

[jono]

The whole blame it on China, or blame it on WHO, is a trivial discussion to me. Even if in late December, China and WHO had started screaming at the rest of the world that the virus is serious, highly infectious, airborne, ect. would that have changed where we are at today? Do people think the entire world could have shut themselves off from China and keep the virus isolated there? It was inevitable that a virus this infectious (but not so deadly it kills itself off, like SARS-CoV) was going to spread everywhere on earth. Trying to isolate the virus in China may have helped slow the spread, but I don't think this was realistically possible regardless of what China and WHO were broadcasting at the early stages of the pandemic. But China and WHO do provide an easy scapegoat.

Do you ever feel like your imagination's best talent is its ability to imagine that it's given you a complete view of all the possibilities?

It's not like we could have done anything at all. Nothing can possibly be effective. Isolating travelers for a couple weeks, producing tests, keeping the spread small enough to make contact tracing possible instead of just assuming everyone might have it. Australia still has an active case, so there's nothing to be done. 1 death = 234k deaths. It's all the same.

I'm sorry, I'm sure you're not trying to make that the point, and it's true that the WHO and China's propoganda are less to blame than the delays here. But the mistakes aren't comparative, they add up.

[The AD]

@basinbeater Do you remember the press conference where a doctor working for the WHO spent a bunch of time praising the Chinese government and the great job they were doing?

They DID do a good job dealing with the virus in China. Not so much warning everyone else how serious it was. OTOH, I'm certainly not all that confident that--had the virus originated here--that we'd have been real forthcoming, either.

[jono]

They DID do a good job dealing with the virus in China. Not so much warning everyone else how serious it was. OTOH, I'm certainly not all that confident that--had the virus originated here--that we'd have been real forthcoming, either.

The statement was made while things were not going so well, as I recall--numbers very underreported etc. It lacked credibility except in showing what it was that his handlers hoped people would believe. Probably the clearest warning they could give, really.

[The AD]

The statement was made while things were not going so well, as I recall--numbers very underreported etc. It lacked credibility except in showing what it was that his handlers hoped people would believe. Probably the clearest warning they could give, really.

How confident are you that our government would have been any more forthcoming? I mean, Trump is now claiming to have beaten the pandemic when new cases are at all-time highs and hospitals are filling up.

[jono]

Oh not confident of that at all, obviously. If I were a member of our government I would feel super hypocritical blaming China for anything. To some extent, at least, there had been a bit of an international social compact that implied that the American CDC would offer meaningful assistance (in exchange for the extremely valuable early data) and we had already reneged on that, so it's easy to see China feeling wronged, too. Excuses and blame are plentiful.

[John_B]

Jono, I think you're wrong. I don't believe anyone in the government has feelings.

[jono]

Well, I'm not in the government, so you might be right. But speculatively, if I was, everything would be different. I mean...obviously.

[altasnob]

I posted this NY Times article way, way back that touches on WHO's reason for advocating against travel bans, and it wasn't because China was telling them what to do. Does it mean WHO was right to advocate against travel bans? No. But it shows that WHO was advocating against travel bans not at the behest of China, but because that is what the majority of epidemiologist and experts believed at the time. Their opinions may be different today:

The World Health Organization said open borders would help fight disease. Experts, and a global treaty, emphatically agreed. But the scientific evidence was never behind them.

When the coronavirus emerged in China in January, the World Health Organization didn’t flinch in its advice: Do not restrict travel.

But what is now clear is that the policy was about politics and economics more than public health.

Public health records, scores of scientific studies and interviews with more than two dozen experts show the policy of unobstructed travel was never based on hard science. It was a political decision, recast as health advice, which emerged after a plague outbreak in India in the 1990s. By the time Covid-19 surfaced, it had become an article of faith.

“It’s part of the religion of global health: Travel and trade restrictions are bad,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who helped write the global rules known as the International Health Regulations. “I’m one of the congregants.”

Covid-19 has shattered that faith. Before the pandemic, a few studies had demonstrated that travel restrictions delayed, but did not stop, the spread of SARS, pandemic flu and Ebola. Most, however, were based on mathematical models. No one had collected real-world data. The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the latest coronavirus is still not understood.

“Anyone who is truthful is going to tell you it’s a big fat ‘We don’t know,’” said Prof. Keiji Fukuda, a former senior World Health Organization official who teaches at the University of Hong Kong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/w...ronavirus.html

Blaming WHO for not telling us to lock our borders is similar to blaming scientist for not telling us cigarettes cause cancer in 1940s. WHO was just broadcasting what was the accepted scientific principle at the time. Does not mean that principle was correct.

[jono]

To be fair, I also don't think it would matter if our government tried to suppress news of a novel virus in this country: the same thing that keeps us from killing it off would make hiding it impossible.

[CarlMega]

I'm trying to understand this: cast blame on the WHO for not directly force feeding you about how dangerous the virus was back in Jan

vs

Praise Trump and the admin for telling us how NOT dangerous the virus is NOW and how it's turned the corner